There are many circumstances in which rooms are required for short-term human occupation and work or the like. One example is the occurrence of a disaster. In addition to rooms for treating the sick and operating theatres, living and sleeping accommodation for rescue personnel are also required, as well rooms for kitchen and food supplies and other necessaries, such as office work and the like. It has hitherto been customary to employ mobile accommodation complexes, i.e. vehicle-mounted, or otherwise being suitable for transport, tent-like facilities. In disasters, it is often a matter of how fast a facility can be available for use. Vehicle-mounted facilities frequently cannot be used because the approach roads cannot be negotiated and airborne facilities need landing grounds, which are frequently unavailable, so that, in the final analysis, primitive initial facilities are employed which can be carried by helicopters. A further complication is that disaster rescue services must be suitable for any and every kind of climate, i.e. the rescue facilities must cope with arctic cold and snow storms as well as tropical sweltering heat and downpours of rain and desert heat. Finally, they must depend considerably on the nature of the sub-soil, because the presence of level, dry and firm terrain is the rare exception. It is evident that in such cases, tents and similar light-weight first-aid facilities do render valuable service but are scarcely adequate for meeting the conditions of climate or of terrain.
There are, it is true, lightly constructed facilities which can be dismantled and re-erected and are transportable in the form of a kit. However, their assembly and preparation as a rule take a lot of time and require the services of quite a large number of rescue personnel, often skilled manpower, so that the immediate availability of such facilities is out of the question.
Such readily assembled systems of accommodation are as a rule pre-planned and pre-fabricated, i.e. predetermined in their final form. This restricts, on the one hand, the nature of accommodation possibilities varying from disaster to disaster and in addition impedes construction at any and every location, because the predetermined form of the accomodation postulates suitable terrain.
The field of application of the container systems initially disclosed is not, however, restricted to disasters, but extends to a variety of other fields. According to season, for example, rooms are temporarily required for tourism in specific cases in substantial numbers. For large events, rooms are needed for accommodation and administration, and offices are needed for the management of congresses and conferences and the like, which are provided for short-term use and then have to be removed.